


The Nature of Fear

by DictionaryWrites



Series: Elvhen Ascension [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Confessions, Dalish Elven Culture and Customs, M/M, Magic, Vallaslin (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 13:03:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20706458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: Lavellan speaks, for once, at length.





	The Nature of Fear

The firelight was burning low in their encampment on the Exalted Plains, every face around the fire lit by the deep orange haze. Dorian rested on the ground, reclined on the mattress of his bedroll – if mattress it could be called, seeing as it was comprised purely, it seemed to him, of sharp stones and steel wire. Solas was seated cross-legged beside him, his gaze downcast on a book as he made notes in a journal beside it, and across the fire…

Like this, Iron Bull _glistened_. Dorian could see the shine of firelight on his grey flesh where the scar tissue had grown in. It _shimmered_, slick-looking the way that scars were.

The Bull was seated on a bench made up of a huge log, his elbows resting on his thighs, and Lavellan was sitting between his ankles, leaning subtly against the great trunk of Iron Bull’s leg. He was the surprise – his shirt was unbuttoned, his lithe chest showing, and there were almost no scars on it at all.

All Dorian could see marking his body was, as was to be expected, the vallaslin that marked his face in a symmetrical pattern, a large tree that covered the whole of his forehead, and two little branches out along the cheeks.

Lavellan was staring into the fire, his gaze defocused, and Dorian could see the flicker of it in his eyes, lighting up the green flecks in the brown and making it look, just for a little while, like the green was the dominant colour. He had his palm out, and Dorian could see the softly shimmering emerald of the mark cut through his hand.

The fire glinted green for a moment, a little puff of smoke shifting apart from the rest.

“Not here,” Solas said, glancing up from his book without moving his head. His tone was gentle, but stern. He was often like that with Lavellan, and Lavellan didn’t seem to find it condescending or annoying – he deferred easily to Solas in a way that he didn’t, with Vivienne, with anyone else who seemed to _want_ him to defer. It was the fact that Solas didn’t demand deference that made Lavellan hand it over, Dorian thought. “Not now.”

“Sorry,” Lavellan murmured. His gaze refocused, and he looked over at Solas. “I didn’t realize I was doing it.”

“An interesting sign,” Solas murmured. “Reflexive?”

“I guess,” Lavellan said. His voice was quiet, and his head tipped back, just slightly. His cheek touched Bull’s knee, and Bull touched his shoulder, stroking over the skin. There was something about him that relaxed, it seemed to Dorian, sitting at Bull’s feet like that. It was hard not to be curious about the relationship they had, but he watched them sometimes, watched the way they talked back and forth in the field, versus in these quiet moments together.

Dorian wished, at times, that he could have a relationship like…

He didn’t know.

“Were you frightened of your magic?” Lavellan asked. “When you realized you had it?”

“No,” Dorian said.

“No,” Solas said quietly. “But it’s different for us, lethallin. We were each born and raised with our magic – what you have… It isn’t the same.” He shifted forward, and Dorian noted how perfectly straight his back was, even sitting cross-legged, how perfect the elf’s posture always was. “You’re frightened of magic?”

“No,” Lavellan said.

“You’re frightened of power,” Dorian said.

(_“Could I be… a god, then?” Lavellan asked, and Dorian wasn’t able to make out precisely what his face meant, what his features were communicating. There was something guarded in his face, but something desperate, too, and Dorian gritted his own teeth, trying to fight the roiling disgust in his belly. “With this… this thing, in my hand, if I walked into the same place— Corypheus…”_

_“I suppose,” Dorian said. “You might have power over everything, with a mark like that.”_

_Lavellan turned his face away. Dorian waited, just for a moment, before he voiced his distaste at that sort of want for power, before he brought up Alexius, before he argued—_

_And Lavellan threw himself over the fencing beside them, and retched until his stomach was empty.)_

“I’m not frightened of power,” Lavellan said softly. “I just think it’s better when shared, when it isn’t…” He trailed off. He pressed his knees together, his lips pursing, his brow furrowed. “When I was around eighteen, I wanted to go to Kirkwall. This was many years ago, before the Blight began—”

“How old are you?” Iron Bull asked.

“Thirty-four,” Lavellan said. “Thirty-five this summer, assuming I live that long.”

Iron Bull swore in Qunlat, and Lavellan arched his eyebrows, laughing.

“You thought I was older?”

“_Younger_, obviously_!”_

Lavellan smiled, his fingers brushing the Qunari’s calf. Iron Bull was searching the space before them, as if turning over this new revelation in his head. Dorian felt, abruptly, very young, very small, surrounded by all these _real_ adults – Iron Bull was in his thirties, Lavellan in his thirties, and Solas was… old.

“I didn’t want people to know that I was Dalish,” Lavellan said quietly. “People can be so funny about elves, but it’s worse, when they know you’re Dalish, and I wanted to be… I wanted to pass into the background. I only wanted to observe, you know? I was always so curious about the humans, the way that they lived, but I wanted to see the tree in Kirkwall’s alienage.”

“They cared well for their vhenadahl in Kirkwall,” Solas said softly, smiling. “It burned, in that business between the mages and the templars.”

“I put make-up on my face,” Lavellan said. “To hide the vallaslin, so that people would think I was just one of the elves of the city, I didn’t…” He trailed off, staring once more into the fire. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I was only a young man, and I don’t like, I’ve never liked, when people look at me, and stare as I walk past. I’m not ashamed to be Dalish. I’m proud of my people, proud of my language, but I just wanted to be a face in the crowd, not an object of scrutiny.”

Dorian thought of the way people looked at Lavellan in Haven, the way that he shied away from huge crowds, kept aside from people passing him by too closely. He shuddered when people called him their titles, at times. There were moments where he looked like he was drowning under it all.

“I came back to our camp, and I had so many books under my arms, I’d sketched so much in the city… I wanted to show our keeper the sketches I’d made of the vhenadahl—” He looked to Dorian, and even though Dorian hadn’t asked, he said, “The tree of the people: it’s a thing they do in alienages. They have a tree and they grow it communally – water it, feed it, love it. It’s a ritual, as much as we have our own rituals. I forgot about my painted face. I’d had my vallaslin for nearly two years, I’d gotten it when I was sixteen, about to turn seventeen. It’s a sign of adulthood, when you receive your vallaslin, that you’re ready to contribute as a whole, and…”

When Lavellan swallowed, his throat bobbed. It was so rare that he spoke at length at all, and Dorian was spellbound by the way he talked, the natural lilt to his voice, the _quietness_ of it, and how intent he was, always. Always so focused.

“It’s a tattoo, you see. It’s under the skin. She looked at me with such horror, and I realized, and wiped at it with a wet cloth, and I explained, and she looked at me with such… She was dumbstruck by it, and she was so angry with me. Once she got over the shock, I’d never seen her so incandescent with rage, so utterly furious. I’d been frightened of Keeper Istimaethoriel before, but in the way that any child is frightened of their elders. She was always kind to me, always loving. My parents died in an accident when I was six, one of our aravels got turned over, so the Keeper raised me as much as any of the other members of the clan, you know.

“To her,” he said, “I suppose… She thought of it as me taking off my Dalishness, what made me _me_, making myself like the shemlen, or like the city elves. She thought that I was devaluing my connection to the clan, to all of us, she thought I was _ashamed_, or…”

He inhaled. It was slightly ragged. The Iron Bull had his fingers on the back of his neck, resting at the base of it, and Lavellan was leaning back into his hand.

“Her magic _crackled_ in the air. It felt so thick between us that I felt as if were standing underwater, so heavy, oppressive, and then it sparked, and caught a flower aflame. She came to herself, then, she realised, and put it out, but I’d never… I’d never been frightened of magic before. Not even when fighting with apostates, or when watching the keepers train their offensive magic, it had never frightened me, but in that moment, I was terrified. Not that I thought she would hurt me, but that magic _could_ hurt me, that it was a force, not a…”

Lavellan looked down at his fingernails. “She never looked at me the same, after that. I was a good hunter. I know our stories well, I can recite a lot of poetry, a lot of… But she thought I was too interested in humans, in city elves, in Qunari and dwarves, even, before that, and when she… She must despise me, now. Her letters are polite, but all this, it must only be confirming what she suspected. All these shemlen call me the Herald of Andraste, and that’s all I am to them, the elvishness, the Dalishness stripped away. I expect she thinks this is my wildest dream come true.”

He rubbed his fingers over his thighs, his knees, and then he turned his head. He said something very quiet, so quiet that Dorian wasn’t even certain that it was the common tongue – it could have been Qunlat, it could have been Elvish. He seemed to have the command of a few languages, even in a limited capacity.

He was just a quiet man, a small and quiet man, who liked to study.

When he stood to his feet, Bull stood with him, and they walked away together, to the tent at the far, far edge of camp.

“You have ear plugs?” Dorian asked Solas.

“They won’t help,” Solas said, looking down at his book.

Dorian sighed, and lay down properly, his blanket drawn over his shoulder. He stared at the quietly blazing embers.

“He’s frightened of us,” Dorian said.

“He’s frightened of everybody,” Solas replied. “Not that they’ll hurt him, not that they’ll hurt one another. That they’ll _hurt_. That they’ll be hurt, themselves. He wants to experience others without being overly experienced himself.”

“Like you,” Dorian said. “With your spirit walking.”

“The Inquisitor isn’t like me, young man,” Solas murmured. “For all your sakes, you ought hope so.”

Dorian closed his eyes.

He heard a gasping, choked-off whine from across the camp, groaned, and put his fingers in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Feel free to hit up [my ask on Tumblr,](http://patricianandclerk.tumblr.com/ask) to talk about DA in general, and definitely to recommend blogs to follow! I am open for requests (for Origins, II, and Inq).


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